Noah Smith

125 Flips | 22 Magazines | 171 Likes | 16 Following | 1 Follower | @zenihilist | Keep up with Noah Smith on Flipboard, a place to see the stories, photos, and updates that matter to you. Flipboard creates a personalized magazine full of everything, from world news to life’s great moments. Download Flipboard for free and search for “Noah Smith”

Slack is a web app. Trello is a web app. Google Docs. Gmail. Even Twitter.<p>The web started out as a collection of hyperlinked documents. The “Web 2.0” hype in the mid-2000s was about how the web was becoming interactive. At first we were just commenting and upvoting on hyperlinked documents, but …

There’s a phrase I’ve been thinking about a lot recently by the great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He says in his book <i>The Gulag Archipelago</i>, “Wherever the law is, crime can be found.” —Ta-Nehisi CoatesChekhov for me is the great writer of compassion. —Cornel West<p>It was the fall of 2008 …

Kentucky is the first state to require Medicaid recipients to work or get job training in order to qualify for aid. NPR's Scott Simon talks to Gov. Matt Bevin about the new requirements.<p>Transcript<p>SCOTT SIMON, HOST:<p>Kentucky's poised to become the first state to require its residents to work, …

A record number of House Republicans are retiring. History shows that after a new president wins, his party doesn't fare well in the next midterms. President Trump also has low approval ratings.<p>Transcript<p>SCOTT SIMON, HOST:<p>Congressional Republicans seem to be rushing to retire. There are a couple of …

President Trump's suggestion that some countries produce more desirable immigrants than others echoes thinking popular nearly 100 years ago, when visas were allocated on the basis of national origin.<p>Transcript<p>SCOTT SIMON, HOST:<p>We heard this week that President Trump believes some countries produce …

In a White House meeting with members of Congress this week, President Trump is said to have suggested that the United States accepts too many immigrants from "shithole countries" in Africa and too few from countries like Norway.<p>Those comments, relayed to NPR by people in attendance at the meeting, …

This liberal philosopher predicted Trump’s rise in 1998 — and he has another warning for the left.<p>A prescient passage from a forgotten book made the rounds after Donald Trump’s election. It was plucked from a 1998 book titled <i>Achieving our Country</i>. The author is Richard Rorty, a liberal philosopher …

A former writer on Westworld and author of How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe on Universal Paperclips and Subsurface Circular<p><i>“But let us note at the outset that however many stops there are between here and human-level machine intelligence, the latter is not the final destination. …</i> …

In the past three days, Republican leaders in the Senate scrambled to corral votes for a tax bill that the Joint Committee on Taxation said would add $1 trillion to the deficit — without holding any meaningful committee hearings. Worse, Republican leaders have been blunt about their motivation: to …

Trump’s supporters backed a time-honored American political tradition, disavowing racism while promising to enact a broad agenda of discrimination.<p>THIRTY YEARS AGO, nearly half of Louisiana voted for a Klansman, and the media struggled to explain why.<p>It was 1990 and David Duke, the former grand …

Creating an app is hard work. A lot of encouraging articles will tell you it’s easy. I’m probably guilty of this.<p>It’s not. It’s really hard work. Trust me.<p>Coding is one of the only types of work where you can spend an entire day focused and working hard and actually come away in a worse state than …

Assassin's Creed Origins is a dense action-RPG with no shortage of mechanics to master and interesting details within its world that don't make themselves readily apparent. After spending numerous hours with the game, we've learned a fair number of tips that we wish we knew before starting the …